all that glitters...
As I'm sitting here, watching this evenings BBC News, with all its faults, and unapparent bias, I'm left wondering what clout as consumers, customers as voters we really have. I try not to watch the end of news broadcasts because I know that they are constructed so that the last thing we see as viewers is something light hearted, humorous, distracting just as the character of Boris Johnson is currently suggesting. What I do try and remember is what came first, the fact that the housing market is in somewhat of a collapse, the fact that a very strange man kept his daughter locked in a seller for the last 24 years, which I really don't want to think about, the fact that a 19 year old with a very privileged education is up on terrorism charges... Where ever you look and what ever news you watch, none of it is remotely helpful to us at our island end of this country. Apart from the housing market, perhaps the most important thing to us and our industry currently are the increase in fuel prices. £1.28 pence for a litre of diesel, and how do we respond as a country? A few of us blockade london. That's it. But surely fuel costs means something to us, something to our cost prices, something to our shopping budgets, something to our survival budgets. Doesn't it?
But perhaps our ethically minded actions also follow through to the european money that currently services our area. Several people today reminded me that although we as a sector try to encourage retailers to get involved in our projects so that we can say, 'yes this is what the industry want', some of our boundaries are already made before we have had a chance to mould them. As a sector, and as a business we can blame who we like, the LSC, (Learning and Skills Council), our local politicians, our public sector representatives, perhaps even those who so proactively state that they represent the sector, from people like me, right through to the likes of the FSB and our local chambers. But who ever we blame, these parameters are already set. So perhaps our real bug bearing lies with the current government who say and therefore actively pursue the line that NVQ training is what our current workforce need. Of course we could shout about the impracticalities of this, until we are blue in the face, but it won't change the current goal posts, or gain us any time in the process. Neither will it change the fact that there are certain things that are crucial and imperative to individual businesses, such as health and safety and employment law; things all businesses need to keep abreast of regardless of cost, if they want to continue trading within the remits of the law. And yes, as businesses they need to take responsibility for providing time and money for these essential things, thins that make their businesses work, otherwise they fail to compete and we fail to comply to plan and to trade as we should do.
What we can do currently, and easily, or perhaps not so proactively, jugging by our current active reaction to things like fuel prices, is consider our future. Who are we going to employ, how are we going to get them, keep them, encourage them to work harder and smarter; how are we going to invest in our current work pool? As a county and as an industry we have a transient workforce, one day you have a sales assistant, the next day, he or she is someone else's receptionist, the next day, the same person is another companies PA. We want skills to be transferable, we want a better work pool from where we can fish for the strongest and biggest swimmers, or at the very least, catch ourselves a few tiddlers that we can bring on, and nurture into full sized sharks...
So to get back to the news, which has I must admit, been some what diminished by the weather, and other such conundrums, there is always a bigger picture. There are those things we react to, those that we remember and the majority of which we simply raise our eyebrows at and comment to ourselves or our partners, about the current predictable behavior of our government and the 9 billion pounds profit that shell and its counterpart made out of our hard earned cash in the last financial year. But we do nothing about it. One vote is much the same as another these days, we swap one bad government, leader, proposal, project for another without voice, so by the time we think about saying, "what about us", we are always, just a little to late, to make a difference.
